"Claudia Rankine's book-length poem 'Citizen' was nominated for National Book Critics Circle awards i..." — Glenn Ligon

Doors have an immediate familiarity. They're everywhere. They're scaled to our bodies, so there's something human about them.

Language controls how you are perceived by others, and in that sense, it is a prison.

Is there such a thing as black art? Or are there just artists who are black?

The public schools in our neighborhood were so bad that the teachers in the school said you shouldn't send your kids here. My mother called around and found a school that was willing to give both me and my brother scholarship money. It's a classic story about black parents wanting more for their kids than they had for themselves.